A lost life turned around

Friday

Nov 16, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Clive McFarlane

Jorge Sierra, who operates two barbershops in the city, spends a lot of time speaking to young people these days and one of his recurring messages is that there are three likely outcomes to a gangbanger’s life — death, jail or a wheelchair.

He is proof of the truth in what he tells them. In 1994, then a 17-year-old father of an infant girl and living in Connecticut, he was shot six times in a gang-related shooting that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

The betting line in his community then was that Mr. Sierra’s paralysis was a death sentence, given that he was a young, uneducated Latino male without any support structure.

But Mr. Sierra, 39, and who dropped out of high school in the 9th grade, didn’t succumb to those expectations, which is what makes his story so compelling and why he believes he can help young people make better decisions in their lives.

“When you are no good to anyone, you find out who your friends really are,” he said of the days and months following his recuperation from the shooting.

“After the incident, my family broke up. Some (including his mother and daughter) went to New York, some came to Massachusetts. I began living with friends, jumping from apartment to apartment. It was a dark time. I got angry and angrier at everything.”

Mr. Sierra who, because of his paralysis needs to self-catheterize, did not take very good care of himself and was hospitalized with an infection that nearly ended his life. It was after surviving this latter illness that he shook his doldrums and thought about coming to terms with his condition.

He moved to Worcester in 1996 to be with his grandmother, but after she left for New York six months later, he once again found himself relying on friends for shelter, and when no friends could be found, he would stay at the People in Peril shelter on Main Street.

Looking back, it is hard for him to pick the one thing that triggered the upward trajectory of his life, but he strongly believes it was a combination of his fight and perseverance along with the remarkable charity and empathy of the community in which he lives.

A GED course he took at Plumley Village in 1997 allowed him to meet Maureen O’Doherty, then director of human resources for the Seven Hills Foundation. Ms. O’Doherty recruited Mr. Sierra as a recruit in the foundation’s Urban Youth Program, which provides medical, social and educational services for those with physical, emotional and development disabilities.

Mr. Sierra was subsequently hired by Ms. O’Doherty to help staff a residential home for developmentally disabled adults in Holden, a job he held for about 11 years.

The position helped to broaden Mr. Sierra’s sense of his possibilities. During lighter moments, he would occasionally wheel himself into the offices of various city agencies, businesses and other organizations to ask if they had a job for him. His purpose was mostly about having a little fun watching the reaction his targets, such as the time he approached a military recruiter to enlist.

That was his intention that day in 1999 when he wheeled himself into the Rob Roy Academy on Pleasant Street, after flirting with a young woman who was taking classes at the school. The person he toyed with that day was Jana Giaquinto, a staff member. She, however, was not the least bit uncomfortable with Mr. Sierra and his wheelchair.

“ ‘Oh, you can be a barber,’ she told me, and I was like ‘what?’ ” Mr. Sierra recalled.

“She then showed me around, and explained what I had to do.”

Mr. Sierra took the necessary course work and obtained his license, and following several uncomfortable attempts at landing a barber chair, he was finally hired by Greg Weatherspoon, who owns several barbershops in the city.

Today, in addition to his own two barbershops, MVP’s on Grafton Street and Sierra’s Salon & Barbershop on Main Street, Mr. Sierra is an assistant barbering director at Rob Roy Academy, where school director Sue Derosier said he wields strong influence over students.

“He tells them they can do it, and they think that if he can, then they can, too,” she said.

Mr. Sierra, who spent the morning yesterday speaking with students at the Seven Hills Charter School, is also distinguishing himself as a youth advocate in the community. He reclaimed custody of his daughter when he got his first job with Seven Hills Foundation.

He proudly talks about her graduating next spring from the Worcester Technical High School and going off to college. But he also talks hopefully of all the other young people growing up in the city.

“Young people in the inner-city don’t have too many folks to turn to, and I am hoping I can use my position to be a powerful force in their lives,” he said.

“I think my story, where I have been, where I am now, and where I want to go — can be a powerful pull for them.”